Catherine Gallagher

Catherine Gallagher is the Emerita Eggers Professor of English Literature, and she taught at Berkeley from 1980 until her retirement in 2012. Her teaching and research focus on the British novel and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She taught courses on the history of the British novel, the historiography and theory of the novel, alternate-history narratives, and various other topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She received NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin.In 2002, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.She served as co-chair of the editorial board of the journal Representations and as the Chair of the English Department. She has served as a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center. Her books include two edited volumes, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (with Thomas Laqueur); and the Bedford Cultural Edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. And she has authored five works of literary history and criticism. Her 1994 book, Nobody's Story, won the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding literary study, and the American Philosophical Society awarded her 2018 book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Literature, the Jaques Barzun Prize for the year's best book in cultural history.

The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea o....

Practicing New Historicism, 2001
For almost thirty years, new historicism has been a highly controversial and influential force in literary and cultural studies. In Practicing the New Historicism, two of its most distinguished practitioners reflect on its surprisingly disparate sources and far-reaching effects. In lucid and jargon-free prose, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt focus on five central aspects of n....

Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace
Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial pe....

Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Literature
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern-day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. This book locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in....

My current work examines the connections between alternate history novels, counterfactual histories, social policies, and political debates. One part of the project examines current intersections of these four phenomena, explaining what they tell us about the state of our collective historical imagination. The second part explores the thesis that non-linear narrative forms, which develop alternate paths that a story might take, have been used since the eighteenth century, when counterfactual history was first used by military historians to help train future officers. The project is more broadly a study of how narrative form meets historical ambition, especially during periods of national redefinition.